If you read yesterdays post, you will know that this is part of an ongoing experiment series centered around success and getting life back on track.
Today I’m giving you the first step in the process and my personal outline of goals.

Step 1 – Document your goals. Know what you want. (you cannot hit a target if you do not know what it is).

Seeing that it’s a new year, this makes it a perfect time to implement in writing what your specific goals are. (did you catch that? IN WRITING) … This is a secret that many people fail to grasp, something wonderfully subjective happens when we write down our goals, we take the first step towards manifesting them into our physical realities. How can you expect things to happen if you do not take the simple steps to ensure that you are doing your part?

My resolutions (goals) in order of priority for the year of 2009. (these will be broken down into simple steps over many up and coming posts).

1. Be the very best Dad possible for my darling daughters.
2. Have more fun then I have had in any previous year to date.
3. Be in better health then I have been in any previous year to date.
4. Maintain a daily meditation schedule to keep centered and keep a positive mental attitude.
5. Learn a new song on the guitar each month.
6. Become proficient in last years new programming language (Ruby) and learn one new language (To Be Decided).
7. Inspire as many other people to be the best that they can be, and inspire them to inspire others.
8. Produce and be a part of a successful and synergistic Master Mind group.
9. Post a new blog entry for every day of the year (minimum 300 words). and create a healthy subscriber base.
10. Launch the clothing line.
11. Learn, Laugh, Live. (healthy, wealthy and wise).
12. Make a metric ass-load (technical term) of money.
13. Be debt free before Jan 1 of 2010.

You may have more, or less goals and its ok if you don’t know HOW you’re going to succeed at them, I don’t have clue one how I’m going to accomplish all of those there, I just know that I WANT to succeed at each of those, and I have faith that the universe will provide a way to accomplish each of them.

I also think that this list will grow as I gain momentum. I just started out with some things and put them in order or importance (as far as the bigger picture goes). Note that cash came at the end of the list. This isn’t to say that I’m putting that off, this is to say that money is not as personally important to me as everything else. I have been at the top and the bottom, several times.

Got your list? Why not? Afraid to play along? Don’t know what you want? You can’t move to Step 2 (tomorrow) unless you finish Step 1 (today).

Please Note:
I don’t want blogging about this experiment to take up too much of my time, and I don’t want it to be the only thing I’m blogging about, so I will try to do a shorter daily updates (like this one) for the remaining 364 days in the solar year, and at least one weekly blog post on something more interesting to the development, programmer, geek, techie community (for subscribers that aren’t interested in this experiment). As you see above, expanding this blog and writing more is one of my personal and professional goals for this year.

Welcome to 2009 and the Back On Track Experiment!!!

Over the next 365 solar days, I’m going to let you in on a few secrets. Secrets that could potentially will change your life if you actually implement them (which is actually the only thing holding anyone back… action). I’m also going to track the progress of the results of these secrets as *I* personally implement them one at a time, so that the skeptics in the crowd can observe the results as they happen to me, because we all know that they are too chicken shit to take the risk required to try something for themselves first. Thats ok though, The smart people reading this will undoubtedly implement these secrets and gain from their benefits as quickly as I do and hopefully we can work together for our mutual benefit.

These are not new principals by any stretch of the imagination, some of what will follow will be my own orderly regurgitation of very old principals, however I know from taking a long and hard look at myself and my own life that the principals are true and do work independently of anything external to ourselves. I know this, because I have been honest with myself, because I have experienced many, many things so far in my life, and I know that *I* am 100% responsible for my attitude, my thoughts, and my actions.

So, the reason for this little online experiment is simple (for me), I need to get my life back in order (currently its a bit of a mess) and one of the primary principals of success is to be accountable for your actions and goals, this experiment is my way of making myself accountable. Its here for anyone to read, so that should help motivate me into action. Feel free to join in, simply sign up for an account here on my blog, and do as I do, or if you have your own blog, follow along and post your own results. I know that success is imminent.

Further to the self motivating factor, I enjoy being helpful and this is a great way to provide some solid information aggregated from many sources over many years into a single location and format… Where it goes from there is anyones guess (a book perhaps?). Because I want to share this information and allow everyone else to share it, while still remaining the copyright holder… these posts (Back On Track Experiment) are released under a creative commons license.

Back On Track Experiment by Robert French is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.robertfrench.ca/contact.php

That means that you are free to copy, distribute, and transmit the work, to remix or adapt the work, but you must credit me as the source if you do, and you may not use the work in a commercial product or for your own financial gain (contact me directly if you need a way around this, I’m sure we can work something out).

Lets be real …
Money is one of the only things right now thats holding me back, there are some other (pretty crazy) factors, but cold hard cash is a big one, I miss my six figure income. Three years ago I was making a one hundred and fifty thousand yearly income writing software, in my own home, and most of the time, in my underwear. Sounds great, but I wasn’t being true to myself, the amount of work I was doing consumed so much of my time that it made me a miserable person, as a result of being a miserable person, I lost everything (and I do mean everything).

Three years later and after plenty of self absorption, analyzation, acknowledgment, planning, and finally acceptance, it’s time to get up, pull my socks back off (I dislike socks) and get my ass back in gear. This time around however, I intend to continue being the happy and strangely optimistic person that I am. I know that money does not, will not, and can not, buy you happiness. But I also know that it does help ease some stress in your life and that in turn will help to make you a happier person (as long as you do not let it consume you). Money is a means to an end, not the end in itself and therefor is not the only focus point of this experiment.

This experiment will yield success in all aspects of life. It does not matter where you are starting from, it does not matter what the specific goals are that you personally are reaching for, the principals and steps to success are exactly the same for everyone.

All that said … onto the experiment!!!